CA AR126

Recognizes the 89th anniversary of the Simele Massacre of August 7, 1933, in which approximately 6,000 Assyrians were killed at the orders of the Iraqi government as a crime against humanity.

Honors the memory of over 300,000 Assyrians murdered during the Genocide of 1915 by the Ottoman Empire, which constituted two-thirds of the Assyrian population at that time.

Acknowledges that California hosts one of the largest Assyrian American populations in the United States and that the genocides and Simele Massacre inspired the creation of the term "genocide" and the Genocide Convention in the 1940s.

Notes that Turkey has not recognized these genocides and that Assyrians continue to face persecution in their ancestral homeland by various state and nonstate actors including Turkey, Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government, and ISIL.